The constant reading of these books, and the persistent reprinting of their formal rules of behavior, may have tended to conserve the old-fashioned deportment of children which has been so lamented by aged grumblers and lovers of the good old times. It was certainly natural that children should be affected by the regard for etiquette, the distinctions of social position which they saw heeded all around them, and in all departments of life. No man could enlist in the Massachusetts Cavalry unless he had a certain amount of property. Even boys in college had their names placed in the catalogues, not by classes, years, scholarship, or alphabetical order, but by the dignity and wealth of their family and social position; and a college boy at Harvard had to give the baluster side of the staircase to any one who was his social superior. Of course the careful "seating of the meeting" was simply an evidence of this regard of rank and station. [Illustration: Thomas Aston Coffin, Three Years Old] It was a profound distance between Mr. and Goodman. Mistress and Goody marked a distinction as positive if not as great as between a duchess and a milkmaid. Unmarried women and girls, if deemed worthy any title at all, were not termed Miss, but were also Mrs. Rev. Mr. Tompson wrote a funeral tribute to a little girl of six, entitled, "A Neighbour's Tears dropt on ye Grave of an amiable Virgin; a pleasant Plant cut down in the blooming of her Spring, viz: Mrs. Rebecka Sewall August ye 4th, 1710." Cotton Mather wrote of "Mrs. Sarah Gerrish, a very beautiful and ingenious damsel seven years of age." Miss was not exactly a term of reproach, but it was not one of respect. It denoted childishness, flippancy, lack of character, and was not applied in public to children of dignified families. In _Evelina_ the vulgar cousins, the Branghtons, call the heroine Miss. "Lord! Miss, never mind that!" "Aunt has told you all hant she, Miss?" A certain regard for formality obtained even in very humble households. The childhood of David and John Brainerd, born respectively in 1718 and 1720, in East Haddam, Connecticut, who later in life were missionaries to the New Jersey Indians, has been written by a kinsman. They were nurtured under the influences of Connecticut Puritanism, in a simple New England home. Their biographer writes of their rearing:--